


Mine's Just Right For Me

by recoveringrabbit



Series: all great words [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: And children, Babies, Family Fluff, Gen, Perthshire Cottage, fitzsimmons family, later chapters will include, mention of canon character death, post s5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-05 06:41:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15164873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: Four times Deke came to visit, and one time he came home.[a story about a family, being and becoming]





	1. The Inaugural Visit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AGL03](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AGL03/gifts).



> A gift for agl03, because she is a great fandom mom and deserves all the FitzSimmons Family her heart desires!

With everything she had lost at the salvation of the world, Jemma didn’t have a great deal of energy to grieve for Deke. The shattering pain of losing Fitz, whether another Fitz still existed or not, took most of the six months they spent searching for him to heal properly, and once that was livable she had Coulson to mourn, and May, and the life they all had once shared together. The disappearance of a man they had known barely three weeks and not even liked all that time was swallowed up in the greater grief—Deke was the result of a life she and Fitz might have lived together and now would not, and while she was sorry that he had not had more time to enjoy trees and sugar and the ocean, they had always more or less expected that he would vanish when that future did.

So his appearance on their doorstep, three months after they returned from space, came as somewhat of a shock.

They had been doing the washing up and arguing, yet again, over how much of their current resources should be spent on the lab v. the house (Fitz: lab first, because they needed good equipment to work well; Jemma: house first, because they didn’t need it straight away) when a knock came at the door, making them both stop and look at each other. “I’ll get it,” Fitz said, flinging the towel over his shoulder, “my hands are dry. And I can fix the shower myself, Jemma, we don’t need to spend money on a plumber.”

“I know you _can_ ,” she called after him as he made his way down the long hall, “but your list of projects is so long already, I don’t want to be waiting another three months to have a shower stronger than a drizzle.”

The house shuddered as he opened the door—it stuck, yet another thing to fix—and she let her mind drift with the Fairy bubbles, mentally rearranging the to-do list to account for Fitz’s frugality. If they moved the shower to his list, perhaps he would agree to have the windows done straight away, before it got too cold...

“Jemma! Could you come here a moment?”

Startled out of her dream renovations, she quickly dried her hands and left the kitchen, hurrying into the hall where she could see his outline blocking the doorway. “Fitz? What is it?”

“There’s, er, a man here who says he knows us?”

“Grandma?”

She took the last few steps at a near run and all but pushed Fitz out of the way, astounded but not surprised to see Deke, wrapped in two jackets and a scarf with a duffel bag flung over his shoulder, bouncing awkwardly from foot to foot. He offered her a hesitant smile, a carbon copy of his grandfather’s. “Hey. Long time no see.”

“That’s one way to put it,” she said, resting her hand on Fitz’s arm for balance. He covered her hand with his and squeezed her fingers.

“Am I to assume,” he said, tiredly, “this is our prodigal grandson? I thought he disappeared.”

“Everyone says that,” Deke huffed, “and believe me, Gramps, you’re not the first person to sound like you wish I had. But I think it’s a little harsh considering you haven’t even met me yet.”

“Of course we don’t wish you had disappeared,” Jemma said, and stepped away from the door to motion him in. “We’re just surprised! You did somewhat vanish, at the end, and then to not have heard from you...”

Deke stopped unwinding his scarf, ends at right angles to his neck. “They didn’t tell you?”

“Tell us what?”

“Safe to assume not.”

Their grandson huffed again, muttering under his breath. “Well, of all the—you’d think of any people they might like—”

“Mack?” Fitz guessed, while Jemma gently tugged at the scarf to remind Deke to finish unwrapping himself. Their hallway really wasn’t large enough for three people to have a long discussion in.

“Daisy,” Deke said, handing over the scarf and one of the jackets, “she said that you guys had left SHIELD and no one was supposed to bother you, so that’s why I didn’t come right away. But it’s been three months and I don’t actually know that many people, so I kinda wanted to see you guys. Sue me.” A pleased smile spread across his face. “That’s a good one, isn’t it? But don’t really sue me. I don’t have that much to live on.”

“How do you have anything to live on?” Fitz asked.

“And would you like some tea?” Jemma added. “Or coffee, I suppose?”

“I’d rather have cocoa?” Deke said hopefully.

As there was one undisputed master of hot cocoa in the Fitz-Simmons household, Jemma left it up to Fitz to answer. Sighing heavily, he started back down the corridor to the kitchen. “Come on, then. Cocoa for the story seems a fair trade-off.”

The story, once recounted, far outweighed even the three mugs of cocoa Deke drank as he told it. Apparently, upon realizing the world was not going to be destroyed Deke went on a bender: a six-pack of Zima, seven bags of gummy bears and one of sour gummy worms, and sort of orange-flavoured sugar in a plastic tube. Then he got into a boat, thinking it would get to the ocean eventually, and went to Canada instead to have a brief dalliance with Border Security before they realized that he had no form of identification whatsoever, so there was nothing to prove he wasn’t a Canadian citizen. This experience having proved the importance of papers, he made his way back to the Lighthouse to get Daisy to make him some, only to find the place deserted.

“I guess you were in space then,” he said. “It would have been nice if you had left a note or something.”

“We thought everyone who needed to know did,” Jemma said. Fitz took her hand and pressed it, fully aware what the furrow between her eyes signified.

Not having proper identification, Deke spent the next few months living with the ghost of General Stoner and the vast stores of food the Lighthouse contained, blowing through the Twinkies in two months flat.

“How are you not a whale?” Fitz asked.

“Clearly he has your metabolism,” Jemma said.

Deke looked between them, clearly confused. “I don’t...I’m a person, we can’t change into...never mind. I did have to find some new pants, but I’m wearing the old ones again.”

As they knew, once they found Fitz and returned planet-side, the Zephyr had dropped them off at Fitz’s mum’s before continuing on to the Lighthouse where the remaining agents of SHIELD, too, had been astonished to find Deke. After catching everybody up on everything that had happened since they last saw each other, Deke and Mack and Daisy had a conference about what Deke should do next. He decidedly did not want to stay with SHIELD, not when there was so much world left to see, but he would need some money and ability to travel if he wanted to eat or go anywhere he couldn’t walk.

“So,” he said, “Daisy made me a fake identity, because she said she had a lot of practice at it, and then I got a job on a salmon fishing boat in Alaska.”

“What!” they exclaimed in unison, but Deke just took a long sip of his cocoa and continued casually.

Fishing, it turned out, was great for Deke: like a cockroach, it took a lot to knock him off his feet, plus he wasn’t being constantly bombarded by a bunch of references he didn’t understand, plus he got loads of—too much, really—experience with the ocean, plus he made lots of money. He also made a friend called Chris, who kindly answered all his questions about idioms and popular culture without questioning his story about growing up underground. Three months and $30k later, the salmon season came to an end and Deke went back home to the Lighthouse, only to find that he was even less willing to spend so much time in the same dark corridors he had lived in all his life. So he decided to travel until he was needed back on the boat, and the first place he came—once he gouged the location from SHIELD—was to visit Jemma and Fitz.

“I figured, you know,” he said, looking down into the depths of his empty mug, “everyone else was going back to see their families, so it would be weird if I didn’t visit mine. Since I already told them I had grandparents, and all. I could have just said you guys died, but—” His eyes grew wide as he gulped. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

The familiar emptiness appeared in Jemma’s stomach, but she held Fitz’s warm hand tight and managed a smile anyway. “We know you didn’t.”

Deke nodded, still not looking up. “And I guess I just kind of wanted to see how you were. They couldn’t tell me much at the Lighthouse.”

Fitz glanced at Jemma, his mouth tacked back at one corner. _Up to you_ , he said, squeezing her hand again before getting up from the table to rinse out the mugs. She took a deep breath. _How are you_ had become such a volatile question in the last few months, the answer dependent on the day; the clerk at Aldi might receive a glib “fine thank you”, but it didn’t seem right to give that response to Deke. “We’re well,” she said finally. “Or at least, we’re getting there. And we’re happy. Aren’t we, Fitz?”

The mugs clinked loudly in the sink and he answered without turning around. “Not as happy as we would be if our boiler didn’t make noises like a crypt opening, but overall.”

“What does that sound like?” Deke asked, midway between intrigued and alarmed.

“Oh, you know.” Fitz made an awful attempt at an imitation— _greeeeeeck-rrrrrrr-t-thump-ump-ump—_ and resumed rinsing. “But it’s twenty years old, so that’s to be expected. We’ll replace it soon.”

“They told me that you were fixing up a cottage. It looks nice.”

“Small steps,” Jemma said, nonetheless looking around the kitchen with pleasure. They had purchased the home sight unseen for next-to-nothing and lived with Fitz’s mum while bringing the electric system up to code, then moved in to do the rest of the work as they could. The kitchen had been one of the first projects—painting the cabinets, putting in new tile—and looked, Jemma rather thought, professionally cosy.

Fitz shut off the tap and started drying the last of the dishes. “Lots more of them, though.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Jemma said. “He enjoys it. We both do. And we need something to keep busy; we’re neither of us used to sitting on our hands.”

Deke clearly had to puzzle that one out, but it didn’t take him long to understand. “You don’t do SHIELD stuff anymore, right?”

“No,” Fitz answered when Jemma could not. “At least, not for now. Maybe not ever. We haven’t decided.”

In truth, they could have probably stayed consultants—goodness knew SHIELD needed them as much as ever. And yet that was precisely the point: SHIELD needed them as much as ever, and they knew before long they wouldn’t only be consulting, but they’d be back on the base, back in the line of fire, back with the life that had ripped them apart far too many times. They didn’t want to waste any more chances.

Deke nodded slowly. “You were good at it,” he said. “But I guess at some point you just need to get away from stuff that happened.”

Of all the people to understand their decision, Jemma wouldn’t have expected Deke to be the best—but what was he doing, but taking a chance he hadn’t expected to get and making the most of it? He was the only person who could understand. She reached out and put her hand over his, smiling her thanks. “I’m glad you’re doing the same.”

One of his thumbs sneaked out to press down on hers. “Yeah.” Then, with somewhat of a guilty glance at Fitz, he stood quickly. “So, this has been a good time, we should do it again soon, but I should get going. Gotta find a place to crash.”

“You don’t have a place to stay?”

“Don’t be ridiculous—you’ll stay here.”

Both Jemma and Deke looked at Fitz, who uncrossed his arms faux-casually and shrugged as though he had merely observed the nights were getting chilly. “What? We’ve got the guest room and the sheets are clean. Nothing to keep Deke from using it.”

As neither of them had an argument against that, Deke was promptly installed in the small guest room with its yellow walls and lavender-scented sheets, and Fitz and Jemma went to their own bed to wind around each other in more ways than one. Though they spent nearly every minute of nearly every day less than twenty feet apart, they never ran out of things to say.

“What do you think of Deke, now you’ve met him?” Jemma asked, her head in its rightful place on Fitz’s shoulder.

His hand toyed with the ends of her hair. “He’s...something else.”

“I still think he’s perfect.”

“And I believe that even less now.”

Of all the things she had told him about their grandson—that he had a belt buckle made of gravitonium, that he had chosen their wedding rings, that he had taken Mack and Coulson’s dating advice—the only one he questioned her on was how perfect anyone who thought _Zima_ the height of alcoholic joy could be. She smiled, smoothing her hand over his shirt. “He reminds me of you. You know I’m rather biased in your favour.”

“Spare me the comparison,” he groaned.

“But you don’t think he’s so terrible, do you? Really, Fitz.”

A quiet moment slipped past in the dark. “No. He’s not that terrible.”

“You said once,” she began, carefully, “that he was like Scrappy Doo.”

References to the Fitz he hadn’t been always required stepping gently, but they had agreed long ago that not talking about it wouldn’t be good for either of them. She held her breath, waiting, hoping, until he made a soft, thoughtful noise, less hurt than it would have been three months ago. “I might stand by that, if I was trying to keep the world from breaking rather than just a dinner plate. I think scrappy is a good word for him anyway.”

“Yeah?”

“He’ll get by, whatever gets thrown at him. He’s a fighter. Had to be, I guess.”

“He did,” she agreed quietly. “It didn’t always make him a very nice person, but it made him a survivor.”

“That’s just a shell, though. It could come off. Like a hermit crab.”

She laughed, making him huff before pressing a kiss to the top of her hair. “You know what I mean. Give him some time, the stuff that’s underneath will come out again.”

“I do know,” she said, and she did. Wasn’t she seeing the proof every day? “I expect we’ll have to feed him in the morning. I hope we have enough sausage.”

With the bacon she found in the freezer and the eggs delivered in from a neighbour’s hens, there was just enough breakfast to go round. Deke ate like he hadn’t in a week, shoveling in toast slice after toast slice as he listened to their daily discussion of what projects needed doing. “You were right,” he said around a mouthful of bread and Nutella, “that’s a lot of projects. You’re doing them all yourself?”

“More or less,” Fitz nodded, taking a gulp of tea. “Cheaper that way. And we’ve got time, and nowhere particular to be. Which is great, since hand-laying all the floors is going to be _fantastic_ to do by ourselves.”

“And you, Deke?” Jemma asked. “What are your plans?”

“Only the best plans ever: I’m going to Hogwarts.”

Fitz sent her a Look over Deke’s head, at once pained and disbelieving, and she bit her lip to keep from laughing. Turning, Deke caught the tail end of Fitz’s expression. “Don’t give me that look. I know magic isn’t real, it’s just science. I meant where they filmed the movie.”

Fitz closed his eyes, unable to cope, and Jemma put another toast slice on Deke’s plate. “I’m afraid Hogwarts isn’t a building you can go to. But you can visit a castle, if you like, or you can go see some of the sets from the film. The Great Hall, No. 4 Privet Drive, Dumbledore’s office. I know it’s not the same, but—”

“We can go to Dumbledore’s office?” Deke’s eyes lit up. “What about Gryffindor Tower? I’m pretty sure I’m a Gryffindor.”

Jemma privately thought Deke was the nicest sort of Slytherin, but said only “Yes, that’s there too. We’ll have to see about tickets.”

“Could we go today?”

“Ah, no,” Fitz said, phone in two hands so he could use both thumbs to type and scroll. “There aren’t any tickets for a month at least, not even on a weekday. What about...three Wednesdays from now?”

Deke pulled his own phone from his pocket and set it on the table, using one finger to unlock it and poke gingerly at the screen. “That will be...almost October. Which is _not_ the spring, so I don’t have to be at the boat.” His face fell. “But I guess I won’t be here anyway, so. Maybe another time, if I come visit again. If you let me.”

Fitz glanced at Jemma, both eyebrows raised; she raised hers back at him, then nodded when he didn’t take back his question. “Of course you can visit again,” she said.

Attention on his phone, Fitz spoke without looking up. “Or you could just stay for a bit, if you wanted. Help lay the floor, maybe. And then we could go on the Studio Tour.”

“Right.” Deke snorted, shoving his phone back into his pocket. “I’ll just spend my vacation with Grandma and Gramps.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Jemma said. “But we’ve just bought the tickets, so you’ll have to be back here in three Wednesdays, anyway.”

Fitz held up his phone to display the confirmation email. “Even sprung for the audio guide, which is an extra £5. Don’t make me waste that money, Deke.”

“Wait, are you serious?”

“Have you ever,” Fitz asked, looking very serious indeed, “known me to make a joke?”

Although Jemma had known Fitz to make many, many jokes, Deke’s experience gave him no reason to doubt Fitz meant what he said, and he promptly agreed to stay, help with the floor, and go with them to Hogwarts (“the Harry Potter Studio Tour,” Fitz corrected every time) at the end of October. More than once in the following three weeks both Jemma and Fitz regretted the generous impulse that resulted in their fledgling peace interrupted by a long-term, very energetic, very talkative houseguest. When they hung up the picture of the three of them in front of the giant model of Hogwarts, though—two blue scarves and a red one, Deke in the middle with a wand, all three of them with grins on their faces—they agreed that, overall, in their first experience of grandparenting the good outweighed the bad.


	2. With Souvenirs and an Existential Crisis

They didn’t see Deke for several months after their Hogwarts holiday. Stating quite firmly that he was done with being cold in his bones, thank you, he chased the sun to Spain and then Morocco, sending them postcards the whole way. Jemma stuck them to the fridge with the magnets they had begun collecting from National Trust properties.

“Is it strange,” Fitz asked, “that we’ve got postcards on our fridge from a man we can’t explain how we know?”

Jemma stepped back to ensure the card with the spitting camel was properly centred, tilting her head speculatively. “Oh, not that strange, surely. He’s someone we know from work who sends us cards on his holidays.”

“Addressed to ‘Grandma and Gramps’.”

“It could be worse. Apparently in the future he called us Nana and Bobo.”

“He did _what,”_ Fitz gasped. Then, shaking his head painfully, he moved on. “At some point we’re going to have to figure him out. What we say to people about him, I mean—your parents, mine, the neighbours. Just because—it isn’t like we have pictures of anyone else laying about. Even from our weddings.”

“We haven’t _got_ pictures of anyone else, really,” she said, “at least, not any that don’t have Daisy in them, and we can hardly put pictures of Quake on our walls if we want to keep a low profile.”

“I know.” He shoved back from the table and came around to kiss her cheek. “I suppose all since our friends are fugitives or members of a secret spy organization, Charles Babbage will have to do.”

Perhaps they could have taken down the Hogwarts picture, but neither of them brought up the idea. Instead, they found some pictures that weren’t too incriminating—old SciOps holidays with their parents; a Bus photo they cropped Ward out of, leaving half of Daisy’s grin; Mack and Yo-yo giving them a hug at their second wedding with everyone’s face hidden by Mack’s enormous biceps—and scattered them in the lounge and down the hall. It was, they agreed, a small but marked improvement (“less self-centred,” Fitz said; “more homey,” Jemma corrected) amongst the many larger ones they slowly but surely ticked off their master list. When Deke came by in February, standing on the step for a half-hour before they came down from sorting out the eaves and heard him shouting, he lingered over each picture thoughtfully. “Your parents look nice,” he said. “Am I related to them too? Is that how this works?”

“Genetics are genetics,” Fitz said. “We’re still, genetically, your grandparents, which means our parents are genetically your great-grandparents. No strange timeline thing or inexplicable anomaly can change that.”

“These are Jemma’s parents.” Deke pointed, correctly. “And that’s your mom. Do you not have a dad? Did he die?”

“I don’t know. Probably better if he did.”

Deke looked to Jemma, who pursed her lips and shook her head. Clearing his throat, he moved on to the next picture. “Do you guys have, like, brothers? Or sisters? Chris has three sisters, isn’t that crazy? Where I grew up no one had any. If you got one kid you wouldn’t get another one.”

“No, no siblings,” Jemma said.

“Siblings.” Deke tried it out once, then twice. “Brothers and sisters are called siblings. And if they have kids, they’re nepews and niches.”

Fitz snorted, almost in spite of himself. Jemma shot him a look. “That’s nearly right. Ne _phews_ and nie _ces.”_

“And if your parents’ _siblings_ have children, that’s...cousins? Do you have any of those?”

“No,” she said again. “I’m afraid what you see of our family is what you get.”

He took another lap around the lounge, picking up each photo in turn. “Well,” he said finally, the one with Daisy in hand, “it’s more than what I had before, anyway. Not a bad deal, I guess. Can I stay for dinner? You guys didn’t have anything else you were doing tonight, did you?”

They had a leisurely dinner in the Aga-heated kitchen, lingering over their casserole for Deke to tell “one more story” about twelve times, turning to cocoa when none of their carefully curated liquour stock lived up to the glories of Zima, exclaiming politely over the remarkable array of truly naff souvenirs he had collected in his travels. The carved monkey sculpture he brought back for them moved Fitz to stunned silence, whether because of Deke’s thoughtfulness or because it was painted lime green and hot pink even Jemma couldn’t say. “No big deal,” Deke said, obviously pleased, “I think it was, like, three of whatever currency they used there. I can’t remember now. Why don’t people just use the same money everywhere? Units were a lot easier.”

“Stubborness,” Fitz said. “National pride.”

“Like you’re one to speak about that,” Jemma teased gently.

“Since when are those insults?”

Deke ignored them, as was perhaps wise. “Have you guys ever been to Morocco?”

He did not and could not know the can of worms he had just opened, so Jemma only slid her foot over to rest atop of Fitz’s as she answered calmly, “I’ve just had a brief stopover there. Fitz went once without me. He didn’t...have a very good experience.”

“You should really go again. It’s the best place I’ve ever been.” Deke took a long swig of cocoa, leaving a streak of chocolate across his upper lip. “But everywhere I go is amazing. Not just, like, how it looks, but how people talk and act and dress and what they eat and everything. I think I could travel for three more years before I run out of new things to see.”

“Maybe a few more than three,” Fitz said, not unkindly.

“Man.” Deke shook his head. “Is there a job that just, like, lets you travel all the time? That’s the one I want. I’ll never see everything I want to if I have to keep working all the time.”

Fitz shook his head. “The unfortunate reality of adulthood.”

“No, that’s not quite true,” Jemma said, snagging Fitz’s empty mug as she pushed back from the table. “More cocoa, Deke? People travel for work in many kinds of jobs. Business, or athletics, or—”

“Phil from  _The_   _Amazing Race_?” Deke held out his mug obediently. “I already thought about that. He’s had that job for, like, thirty years, so when he dies I’m ready. But people get a lot older now than they did in the future. I don’t know if I want to wait that long.”

Jemma turned her back quickly to hide her smile, busying herself with the electric kettle and leaving Fitz to explain that (a) television seasons do not necessarily equate to years and (b) television hosting was not exactly a viable career path, much less becoming a host on a specific show. “You basically have to already be famous,” he said as she brought their fresh brews to the table. “Or, I guess, really, really lucky.”

“But I am really, really lucky.”

“It’s just a figure of speech,” Fitz said, “there’s no such thing as luck, really.”

“No, but there has to be.” Deke looked between them, both eyebrows up in a characteristic family expression. Sometimes she found it strange, how he could be so like them without really knowing them. “I mean,” he continued, “I survived at the Lighthouse for a long time with a bunch of people wanting me dead. I didn’t die when your time machine blew up, or when I got shot and operated on by non-medical professionals. I didn’t...” He swallowed, staring into his cocoa. “I didn’t disappear when the future I came from did. So yeah, I think I’m pretty lucky.”

Fitz met her eyes over Deke’s head, stricken; she sent him what comfort she could and stretched her hand out to rest against the knobbly bone of Deke’s wrist. Like Fitz, she couldn’t believe in luck, but she understood why Deke needed some way to make sense of the life he had been so unceremoniously dropped into. If she thought too hard about the last few years she was almost driven to it herself—the amount of second chances they had been given far exceeded statistical averages. Despite her midnight musings on the subject, she had no alternative to offer. Instead she waited until Deke glanced up at her, then gave him the most reassuring smile she could manage. “Whyever those things happened, they’re of rather a different sort than getting a particular job. There’s no scientific principles behind employment.”

“Right. Science, not magic.” He nodded, eyes on his fingers drumming against the table, so like Fitz it made her heart hurt. “But, um—I don’t know if it’s something you guys ever think about, but I just wondered, you know, since you were so sure that I would poof out of existence and I didn’t, I wondered if you ever...figured out why. Why I didn’t, I mean.”

She and Fitz shared a look weighted down with a hundred conversations and zero conclusions. All theories and hypotheses were inadequate; since nothing could be proven, ultimately their “answer” could only be a guess. But how to explain that there were no answers to someone so desperately looking for them? In their younger days they would have thrown out as many explanations as possible— _time out_ , Coulson used to tell them, _let’s try that again—_ but they had learnt, in their time, that some problems didn’t have solutions. The silence stretched too long, and Deke shook his head and got up from the table. “I’ve thought of a few. Like, maybe we jumped universes, if parallel universes are a thing. Or timelines—maybe the timeline I came from is still going somewhere without me in it. Or maybe it’s just a weird anomaly, and it’s like the universe was too busy figuring out everything else that was going to change to worry about one out-of-place guy?”

“Or maybe,” Fitz said, “unexplainable things happen sometimes, and we don’t ever know why, exactly. Think of all the years the sun went up and down and people thought it was because a man in a shiny chariot was driving back and forth across the sky.”

“Or that rotting food turned into maggots,” she added.

“Or that there wasn’t even such a thing as a Higgs boson to discover.”

Deke looked between them, shifting his weight back and forth. “I don’t know if any of those things are true, but I’m guessing from your tone that they aren’t.”

She smiled. “Chariot and maggots, no, but there _is_ such a thing as a Higgs boson.”

“But you know now,” he pressed. “Someone figured out all that stuff out.”

Fitz shook his head. “But it took millions of years and billions of people. _You_ might not ever know. No one ever really knows why things happen in their lives.”

“What, you mean the cosmos doesn’t have an agenda?” She raised one eyebrow, and Fitz rolled his eyes with a long-suffering sigh.

“ _One time_ , Jemma. And, actually, I took it back if you’ll recall. Twice. Even if you didn’t hear it the first time.”

“To be entirely accurate, you said that we were stronger than the curse, which affirms its supposed reality rather than—.”

“Oh, for the love of—”

“Guys?” Deke waved his arms like an air traffic controller. “Still here. Still having a hard time understanding my existence.”

Their worn-slipper argument came to a quicker stop than usual as they exchanged amused glances, trying to keep them mostly hidden from their earnest progeny. Such a contradiction, Deke, she thought fondly, so old in some ways and so terribly young in others. As though they would be any better equipped to explain his nearly-miraculous existence. As though they could even answer the question for their own. And after all, wasn’t part of understanding it coming to terms with the fact that _every_ individual life was so beautifully improbable?

“What,” Deke said when neither of them responded. “ _You_ don’t have an answer? Not even a guess?”

Fitz stood, taking up the mugs from the table and walking to the sink. “We’ve got ice cream in the freezer, I think, d’you want some? We were going to watch _Blue Planet II_ tonight; if you haven’t seen it I think you’ll really enjoy it.”

Much like a child, Deke allowed himself to be distracted by the promised dessert despite the fact that his forehead still creased with confusion. An hour spent with David Attenborough and the teeming bounty of the ocean, however, cleared his face of everything but wonder. Though Fitz fell asleep in the corner of the sofa—worn out from their exertions in the eaves that afternoon—she and Deke began the next episode by mutual, unspoken, agreement.

“It’s crazy,” he said, watching sharks tear at the sunken carcass of a whale, “to think that all that’s going on underneath us when we’re on the boat. There’s just— _so much_ going on, all the time. I can’t think about it all or I’ll go crazy.”

“It’s incredible, isn’t it,” she agreed.

“Is that why you became a scientist?” He flicked a glance her direction, not quite willing to take his attention from the screen. “My mom always said you guys had to know everything—not in a bad way, just in a way that you loved to find out new stuff.”

She shivered a little, as she always did when Deke talked about his mum—their daughter—a potential future to them, a past reality to him. Already, and not yet. “I became a scientist for a lot of reasons: to help people, because I was good at it, because I would have died before I was born without other people’s work. But yes, I suppose ultimately it was because I was insatiably curious. I mean”—she looked for another word Deke might know—“I wanted to learn everything I possibly could. So did Fitz, about different things. I’m pleased—I can’t imagine how we kept that up in the future you came from, but it’s good to know we were still ourselves in that respect.”

He made an understanding noise and slid further down in his seat. “Can you imagine what it would be like to be the guys with the cameras down there filming? No one had seen it before this. I don’t care how cold and dark it is, I think it would be amazing.”

“It would be,” she said, and was surprised to find she meant it.

They sat in silence until the sharks left and the smaller fish came to pick the whale’s bones clean.

“She was like that too,” Deke said. “That’s why the Kreepers—” He stopped and cleared his throat; she swallowed back a lump, crooking her fingers tighter around Fitz’s unconscious ones, just for reassurance. “I kind of stopped caring, after that. It seemed smarter to be dumb. But, I don’t know, since I’ve been here, I think she was maybe right. There’s a lot of cool stuff to find out about.”

“There is.”

The smaller fish disappeared, replaced by tiny crabs. Even in the poor light from the television, she could read Deke as easily as a results printout—regret, grief, the particular kind of bravery that both she and Fitz assumed when they couldn’t allow themselves the indulgence of feelings. Poor Deke, she thought, not for the first time but with sudden sharpness; imagine having more than you could imagine placed into your hands, and still feeling nothing but loss. Imagine gaining the world, but not being able to share it with the people you love.

Beside her, Fitz shifted, frowning slightly in his sleep as he often did even now. Soon she would have to wake her husband and take him to bed, but before she did she had a responsibility to her grandson. For his mother’s sake, if not for his own.

“Deke?”

He ran a hand over his face before looking at her quizzically.

“We’ve loved getting your postcards,” she said. “It would have been a pity if you had poofed out of existence.”

His eyes dropped to the carpet, and she didn’t attempt to draw them back. But when the episode was ended and Fitz shuffled off to bed and the throw neatly folded along the back of the sofa, he caught her hand before she quite left the room and said “Thanks for dinner. And...and the rest of it.”

“It is,” she said fervently, “my pleasure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blue Planet II is amazing and everyone should watch it. The end.


	3. The Puppies

Nearly a year from Deke’s first surprise visit, the long list of House-to-Home Projects disappeared from the family corkboard. The house was completed, the lab up and running, the garden in a tolerable state of neatness and ready for planting in the spring, and the last item—a long-term project—was well on its way to completion and needed no such reminder, anyway. Instead, they filled the corkboard with more postcards, several possible garden plans, a list of tips for puppy training with Fitz’s bitter commentary in the margins, and a plethora of new black-and-white pictures on flimsy paper; in the evenings, rather than soaking sore muscles in hot baths or sinking exhaustedly into their sofa, they sat out in the garden with frosty glasses or enormous mugs and watched the sun go down. Part of Jemma didn’t quite know what to do with the startling amount of free time, but most of her watched the worried creases in Fitz’s forehead be replaced with laughter lines and gladly took advantage of this short season of relaxation. Goodness knows they had been busy for the last quarter-century straight.

“D’you ever feel,” Fitz asked one evening, lolling on his stomach in the grass, “like we’re getting away with something?”

“Only every day.” She looked fondly down at him from her proper seat above. “You know we’re nearly out of stain remover.”

“I’ll use your formula to make up more tomorrow.” Rolling into a sitting position, he cast aside the bit of grass he had been trying to turn into a whistle and shouted down the garden. “Mops! Away from there!”

The puppy looked up guiltily from her dig at the base of the oak tree and galumphed back to them, black-and-white hair flying out around her as she ran and settling in a cloud when she fell in a heap by Fitz’s knees. His mouth twitched up at one side. “Oh, you’re a disaster, you are. Does someone need a bath tonight? Does she?”

“Oh, Fitz, I’ve just cleaned the tub. Let’s leave her be a few days, at least.”

“Cleaned the tub? I said I would do that. There’s no reason for you—”

“Ugh, Fitz, I opened the window and wore gloves. You need to stop fussing so; you know our research—”

“—it’s not the fumes, and you know this—”

“—and that’s even more silly—”

“—you can’t blame me for being a bit afraid of something going wrong.”

She had a quick retort, of course she did, but his attention was firmly fixed on rubbing Mops’ ears and he didn’t have a trace of levity in his voice. He didn’t need a retort; he needed reassurance. “Everything’s all right so far, Fitz. I can’t promise nothing will go wrong, but we’ve no indications we need to be worried.”

“I know,” he said, still not looking up. “But there’s knowing, and there’s being pretty sure.”

“Not everything always goes wrong.”

“Not true. Second law of thermodynamics.”

“On a cosmic scale, perhaps, but not situationally. Are we in a worse position now than we were a year ago? Or two, or three?”

“S’pose not.” He sighed. “But honestly, Jemma. Somehow we’ve ended up in a life that people dream about having and never get. It’s...idyllic, is what it is. Like something your mum’s great-aunt had painted on a plate.”

She stretched out her hand, silently beckoning him closer, and he came obediently to let her run her fingers through his hair. “So what if it is? We used to live a life out of a sci-fi spy thriller, after all. Maybe this is the dropped shoe that we’ve been waiting for—not something terrible, but something wonderful.”

“Hear hear!”

They both turned—Fitz sharply, Jemma gingerly—to find Deke grinning at them over the low garden wall. He set his much-worn duffel down and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I really hope it doesn’t work that being happy means you’ll be miserable later. Or does it work the other way, too, and if you’re miserable long enough you have to be happy eventually? Oh my gosh, you got a dog! What kind of dog is it? What’s its name?”

As though she understood, Mops loped over to the wall and put her front paws against it, placing her in prime position to lick Deke thoroughly when he bent over to meet her. Fitz got to his feet and stuck out his hand to pull Jemma up. “We got a dog, she’s an English cocker spaniel-type mutt, and her name is Mops.”

Deke didn’t bother looking at them. “Mops? Hi Mops, what a good girl you are, oh, yes you are! Why don’t you have a fancy-schmancy name after a scientist?”

“We tried,” Jemma said, smoothing out her shirt, “but I’m afraid she’s not very intelligent, and we didn’t want to insult Hertha Ayrton that way. Besides, she looks like a mop when she’s lying down.”

By this time, Deke had vaulted over the wall to devote better attention to Mops’ belly. “Oh, are you not very smart? Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Are you even allowed to be in this family?”

“She amuses us, so we’ve decided to keep her.” Fitz smirked and ducked her pointed glare. “We’ve already had our tea, if that’s what you’re after, but there’s some cheesecake left.”

“That’s not very fair, is it, Mops?” Deke cooed. “No, it’s not. Just because they stuff me like a Thanksgiving turkey every time I come here, doesn’t mean I’m coming for that reason. Maybe I just want to see them.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Fitz said, “considering you haven’t looked at us yet today.”

“Have too. Your dog is just—” Deke glanced up, then sat heavily on the ground, his mouth dropping open. “Uh, maybe I didn’t. You’re—! You—!”

Jemma’s laugh boiled over, as it had been doing more often than not, lately. “Haven’t you ever seen a pregnant woman before, Deke?”

“Well, yeah, but...on tv...and everyone says you can’t believe everything you see on tv. How did this happen?”

“Oh Lord,” Fitz said, “did someone never give you The Talk? Do I have to give you The Talk?”

“No,” Deke said loudly, startling Mops, “no, thank you, I am quite—I know everything—I am 100 percent okay if I never have to hear my grandpa talk about how babies are made. Thank you very much for your kind offer.”

Jemma’s eyes laughed into Fitz’s. Slowly getting to his feet, Deke kept staring at her belly, his hands coming out to hover several inches away. “No, I mean—there’s a baby in there. You got a dog _and_ you’re getting a baby?”

“We have them both now, only one we can’t see yet.” Laughing again, Jemma took Deke’s hands and placed them on the swell of her stomach. “We know Baby’s there, though—can you feel the kicking?”

“Oh, my gosh.”

They stood for a moment, the three—four—of them: Fitz, his hand at the small of her back, with the same giddy grin that had hardly left his face since they found out; Jemma, achy and itchy but near tears for an entirely different reason; Deke, clearly at once amazed and revolted by the sensation under his fingertips. He jerked his hands away after a particularly emphatic roil, rubbing them down his trousers and shaking his head. “That’s crazy. That’s so strange. It’s like one of those movies where things live inside you.”

“Possibly because there is someone living inside me.”

“How—um, how long...?”

“A bit over seven months,” she answered, guessing the question, “so there’s about two left to go. 15th of November is the date we’ve been given, though of course it could be shorter. Or longer!”

“You wouldn’t want it to go longer,” Fitz said, and she shook her head in fervent agreement.

“November,” Deke repeated, somewhat breathless. “Wow. That’s—wow.”

“It is,” she agreed, having not found words to better express it. “Very much so.”

Fitz’s hand left her back and joined its mate in a sharp clap. “So,” he said, looking at the sky, “it’s getting a bit chilly, we should probably go in. We’re in the process of turning the old guest room into the nursery and making the old spare room into the guest room, so I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with a bit of higgledy-piggledy. And, as I said, no food.”

Deke nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets. “That’s cool. I don’t mind where I sleep, and cheesecake is a good dinner.”

Despite Fitz and Deke’s combined efforts to convince her that anything one ate at dinnertime counted, she insisted he have something substantial before finishing off the cheesecake. Unfortunately, since they were meant to go shopping the next day, the only thing in the fridge was the ends of a loaf of bread and a tube of Primula left over from the early days of her pregnancy, when the ham-and-cheese spread was all her stomach could handle. He choked the sandwich down obediently, though he had to take long gulps of water after every bite. “That’s awful,” he said when every scrap of crust had gone, sticking out his tongue like he didn’t want the flavor in his mouth anymore, “why would you eat that stuff if you didn’t have to?”

“Unfortunately, I did have to.”

“Unfortunately, we _both_ had to,” Fitz said, though he had been able to eat whatever he liked, as long as he didn’t eat it within three feet of her.

“I’ve eaten some really gross stuff, but that’s worse than spinach dip. Yak.” Smacking his mouth a few more times, Deke shook his head and pulled the cheesecake closer to him, out—sadly—of Jemma’s reach. “This, though. This is amazing. The only thing better would be chocolate lava cake. Can Mops have some?”

“Mops does not get people food,” Jemma said firmly. “It’s very bad for her.”

Fitz nodded, raising an eyebrow at Deke. “She never eats people food, ever. Except carrots and peanut butter and quinoa and toast and the ends of ham sandwiches...”

“Ugh, Fitz.”

“I wish I’d known that,” Deke said, looking down at the dog curled around their feet, “she could have finished mine.” His voice pitched upwards. “Yes, you could have! You would have liked that nasty goop, wouldn’t you?”

“She wouldn’t have.” Fitz shook his head. “Stepped on more than one rejected sandwich, back in the early days.”

“Ohhh, and they said you weren’t smart.” Shoving the final, very large, bite in his mouth, Deke dropped from the chair to the floor to rub Mops’ belly again. “That wasn’t very nice, was it? Was it?”

Fitz looked at Jemma over Deke’s head. “I think it’s safe to say Deke is better than either of us at baby talk. Where did he get that ability? My mouth doesn’t make those shapes.”

“You do fine with Mops. We’ve still got time to practice.” She frowned. “And I’m hopeful some of it will come naturally. If not we’re just going to have to force it; you know how important child-directed speech is for language-learning and cognitive development.”

“We know what research suggests—”

“For English-speaking parents, which we are—”

“—and anyway, language-learning has multiple components—”

“Exactly! So—”

“—so it’s equally likely that we will do our child as much good by speaking to it as we do to each other.”

“Yeah, no,” Deke piped up from the ground, “I’m going to say that you probably need to talk to a baby at about half the speed and work really hard to finish your sentences. Speaking as someone who has had to learn a new kind of English to keep up with you. It’s hard, isn’t it, Mops? Isn’t it? Maybe that’s why they think you aren’t smart.”

Mops wriggled, her tongue lolling happily from one side of her mouth. Fitz ducked his head halfway under the table and reached out to scratch the top of Mops’ head. “We _know_ she isn’t smart. She spent twenty minutes barking at a dirty sock yesterday.”

“Smart isn’t everything,” Jemma said. “She’s a good girl.”

Deke sat back on his heels, idly patting Mops when she rolled away from Fitz to put her chin on his knee. “Just so you know, I’m planning to have your dog sleep with me tonight. On the bed, even, if there is a bed.”

“Fitz!” Jemma put out her hand. “There’s not even a mattress for Deke; it’s leaning up against the wall and the floor’s all paint cans. That won’t do. We’ll have to clear a space.”

“I did say it was higgledy-piggledy,” Fitz groaned, but he obediently rose from the table and went to see about sorting out the new guest room.

Though Jemma was little help beyond directing—her view from the doorway gave her a perspective Fitz and Deke, shoving furniture around with their shoulders, lacked—it didn’t take long for them to get the bedframe, small dresser, nightstand, and lamp into place. Pictures could wait, they all agreed, until the morning when the light would be better, and they retired to the lounge to find something mindless on TV Now until it was time to go to bed. Jemma demurred about choosing, well aware she wouldn’t be awake for long. “One thing you never see about pregnancy on television,” she told Deke, plumping a pillow to put behind her back against the arm of the sofa, “is how exhausting it is. I’ve never been so tired in my life.”

Fitz lifted her feet and slid underneath, setting them back down in his lap. “You slept more when you got back from Maveth.”

“Did I? Perhaps. I can’t remember. So much of that time doesn’t feel like it happened to me at all.”

“I never heard of Maveth. Is it worth going to?”

Deke didn’t look up from flicking through the channels, so he entirely missed the slightly sick expressions she and Fitz exchanged. There was so much he didn’t know, she realized. If time travel and cryogenic freezing were the latest Things We Never Thought Would Happen, they were not necessarily the most unbelievable; she and Fitz had developed scar tissue, but that didn’t mean the wounds weren’t still there. Her hands stroked over her belly, trying to cover their baby’s ears. Someday, they would have to tell the whole story. Not tonight.

“No,” Fitz said, sounding strangled. “Nasty, sandy, horrible weather. Really remote, anyway, so it’s not worth the trouble. Unless you have a particular reason for going there.”

“Okay,” Deke said easily. “So, I’m thinking Bond. Spies are fun. And they have all the little gadget things, you probably like that stuff.”

Jemma closed her eyes and put her head against the back of the sofa, smiling secretly at the face she knew Fitz would be making. His rant about Bond gadgets had been legendary at SciOps, second only to hers about Rosalind Franklin. Sure enough, he sputtered mild objections, then sighed and nestled more deeply into his cushion. “That’s fine. But I’m not going to keep quiet about the blatantly ridiculous science, _or_ the disgusting objectification of women.”

Deke snorted. “Trust me, Gramps, I had exactly zero hope that you would.”

She only heard enough of the movie before dozing off to know that Deke had, happily, picked a Connery film, lulled by the gathering darkness and the relaxing motions of Fitz’s hands on her sore feet and legs. With the explosions and gunshots common in Bond flicks, she never entirely lost consciousness, but her mind wandered pleasantly on the edge of dreams until she heard Fitz say her name.

“Simmons.”

Her eyes cracked open slowly, thinking she was being addressed, but he went on without waiting for her to respond. “She, um, got stuck there and she couldn’t make her way back. She tried for months and months. I had to go after her. And then, later, someone, er, wanted something from there, and I went to get it for them so she wouldn’t have to.”

“Where is it?” Deke asked.

It took Fitz a second to answer; she wasn’t sure, at first if he would. Then, just slightly tightening his hold on her ankles, he said, “It’s in another galaxy. We’re pretty sure, anyway.”

“Really?”

“Well, it had two moons and was liveable, so it wasn’t in our solar system, at least.”

“Wow.” Deke’s mind and something on the television blew up at the same time.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Fitz said wearily. “So yeah, that’s that. Our first experience with a monolith. Then there was the white one that sent everyone to the future, and then I’m told there was an explosion of three of them, while I was frozen.”

“I was there for that.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. I can’t always keep track of who was there when I wasn’t.”

“I don’t blame you.” Deke made a noise in his throat, then said all at once, “You guys are never going to go back to SHIELD, are you?”

Jemma’s breath caught in her chest. Beside her, Fitz’s usual fidgets stilled. “Why do you think that?”

“Because,” he said, matter-of-fact, “you could leave a house, but you can’t leave a dog as easily, and you’d never leave a kid. It would go against your rule.”

“She didn’t tell me you knew about that.” Fitz’s voice scraped gravelly over the words.

“Yeah, psh, everybody did. It was a great rule. I wanted you to follow it.”

But if they had, would this Fitz be here with her now, or would he be floating in space with Enoch forever? Would that have been better, somehow? She would never know the answer. There probably _wasn’t_ an answer. Fitz didn’t try to offer one, either, only drumming his fingers against her leg. “Sometimes you have to. We would if we had to. But no, we aren’t going back to SHIELD. Not to be full-time agents, anyway.”

“Did they give you a hard time about that?” Fitz must have shaken his head, because Deke made a disbelieving noise. “They don’t have anyone like you guys there now, you know. They’re kind of just making do with your notes and what Mack can cobble together and hoping that nothing biological comes along.”

“If it does, we’ve said we’ll consult. But we’re not going to go in. We won’t put ourselves in more than the usual amount of danger.”

“What’s the usual amount?”

“Oh, you know,” Fitz said, “car accidents. Cancer. Lightning strikes.”

“Oh my gosh, lightning strikes?”

Fitz snorted. “Unlikely, but more likely than other things that have happened to us.”

“Good to know, good to know. So, does that mean it’s _likely_ to happen, or—”

“No, Deke, we’re not likely to be struck by lightning. That’s freak weather here.”

“Right, of course, because I can keep track of weather patterns for the entire globe.”

“No one expected you to, it’s just a bit of information to make you feel better.”

“Okay, well. Fine. Thanks.”

They were quiet again, but Jemma’s brief nap made her willing to sit and wait for whatever came next—likely only the end of the movie, since they had no doubt filled their quota of heart-to-heart talks for the evening. Fitz’s hands stilled. One thumb snuck under the cuff of her sock, searching out her skin. “Actually, we have you to thank for it, a bit. Something you and Jemma talked about the last time you were here made her think about it.”

“Something _I_ said?”

The hand not at her ankle left her leg. “Hold on, nothing you said, exactly. Just, she said you got her thinking about why we did what we did, what we wanted to do in the future. What we would want to give to our children. So yeah, we decided to start making the life we wanted to have, instead of staying in limbo. It’s, it’s just an expression—it means the weird sort of grey space between things.”

“I thought it was a game you play on an island.”

“That too.”

“English is weird in the past,” Deke said, sounding as confused as he had when they first came back from the future. Jemma heard Mops’ collar jingle and the _scritch-scritch_ of her nails against the floor; lucky girl was no doubt having her ears rubbed. When he spoke again, Deke’s voice was hesitant. “Last time I went to the Lighthouse, they told me I could stay. Like, join SHIELD.”

“Did you?”

“I said I had to think about it. Money’s better in fishing.”

“Money isn’t everything,” Fitz said.

“It gets you a lot of stuff, though.” Deke sighed. “I don’t know, though. I’m kind of done living at the Lighthouse. They made it sound really exciting, but—I don’t know, do you guys miss it, ever?”

“Sometimes,” Fitz said, honestly. “We were with SHIELD half our lives. We miss our friends. But I dunno, we like the adventure we have now. Even if the only exciting place we see is Aldi. Hey, would you come along in the morning? I’ve got some stuff to get for the baby’s room and you’d be useful to lift things. Jemma’s not much good at it these days.”

She considered objecting, but knew it was true. Deke agreed without much enthusiasm, a sure sign of distraction, just as the opening chords of the movie’s final credits gave her a good excuse to pretend fresh wakefulness. From the other end of the sofa, Fitz’s amused glance told her he hadn’t been fooled by her ruse. “Deke’s coming with us for the shop in the morning.”

“Marvelous,” she said, trying and failing to hoist herself up, “he can choose some things to eat. How long will you be staying this time, Deke?”

He slid from his chair onto the floor, better to scratch behind Mops’ ears. “I’m going to China for the Moon Festival in a couple of days. So not long.” The long line of his back facing them grew taut; he and Mops stared resolutely at the television. “But I might swing back by in a few months? Not for weeks this time, if you’re busy. But—yeah.”

Fitz swung Jemma’s legs to the ground and took both her hands in his, ready to help her up. But his eyes met hers firmly, mouth in a straight and serious line, and she knew they both understood what Deke really meant. What could they say, though? Much as their baby was _theirs_ , it would be both ridiculous and cruel to pretend Deke didn’t have a strongly vested interest. Part of the reason they had kept their news quiet was the knowledge that as soon as Deke knew, they were no longer merely the expectant parents of a child with boundless possibilities but also the parents of a child who had already lived through a limited set of possibilities, made the best of them, and died for it. Deke would bring his own expectations, even if he knew consciously that any baby they had now, with the world whole, would not be exactly the same as the baby they had in his timeline. It was complicated, made all the more so by the conflict between knowledge and feeling. And yet, she thought again, and reminded Fitz without speaking, what other answer could they give? “Of course you can come,” she said, looking over Fitz’s shoulder to Deke. “Our door is always open.”

All the tension went out of his figure. “See, that’s not true,” he said, sounding so relieved she wanted to cry. “Pretty much every time I come here, I have to stand outside and shout for a half hour before you let me in. You guys were just outside this time.”

“It’s just an expression.” Fitz pulled her up and waited until she was steady before letting go. “So, tomorrow, we’ll have breakfast about nine and then go to the shop after that. Also, we have a rule: no one is allowed to put anything in the cart without it being (a) on the list already or (b) approved by the other party.”

“I’m not even going to ask,” Deke said, waving one of Mops’ paws at them. “Good night, fam-i-we. Good night!”

Fitz pinched the bridge of his nose. “Please don’t ever do that again.”

They prepared for bed in silence, manoeuvring around each other with practiced agility and both listening, Jemma expected, for aural confirmation that Deke and Mops had turned in for the night themselves. A series of hollow thuds, followed by the squeak of the guest bedframe, answered that question; a few minutes later, they curled up in the tangled nest of limbs and pillows that had become normal as her pregnancy continued, and sighed in unison at the peace that draped over them with the duvet. Fitz turned out the light, then kissed the nape of her neck. “I love you both.”

“And we love you.” She brought his hand to rest over where the baby’s fist demanded attention. His thumb stroked softly against her skin. “Fitz?”

He hummed, nearly asleep.

“We didn’t tell him.”

With his chest at her back, she could feel him forcing himself to stay relaxed. “Do you think we need to? We aren’t keeping information we know from him, we’re just—”

“No,” she agreed, “but it seems likely that he won’t think to ask, and I would hate for him to be—”

“He isn’t dumb. He knows that, even if it is—it won’t be. Not really.”

“Oh, but, Fitz. There’s knowing, and there’s being pretty sure.”

Whatever he meant to say next stayed on his tongue, and he readjusted his arm under her head. “I think—I think, Jemma, we had good reasons to not find out, and he’d probably understand them. But I think it won’t make a difference to what he’s hoping for. If you want to tell him, I’ll agree, but it might not make it better for him.”

“He still should know, Fitz. It isn’t kind to keep it from him.”

“All right,” he agreed, nodding against her shoulder. “In the morning.”

She turned her head to kiss his wrist. “You know, I expect, that I heard your conversation during the film?”

“About the feasibility of hiding a secret base under a volcano?”

“Fitz.”

He huffed. “Yeah, I knew. And you know that I meant every word? I love our new adventure.”

“I have never once had a doubt about that.” Twining her fingers with his, she gingerly twisted slightly sideways, just enough to meet his eyes. “You might be concerned about baby talk, Fitz, but you have the fatherly advice down pat. You’re a natural at this.”

“Yeah?” His gaze was bright in the dark room.

“Yeah.”

One hand on his cheek, she pulled him down to kiss her; clever man that he was, he stayed longer than a brief buss, pulling away only to mumble against her lips. “He’s not such bad practice, is Deke. We already knew he has a habit of putting everything in his mouth.”

Her peal of laughter kept him from kissing her again, but not for long. After all, soon they would have someone other than a grown grandson and an enthusiastic puppy to care for; they needed to make the most of the few carefree days they had left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There IS a Bond movie with Sean Connery and a secret base under a volcano. I have not seen it, but it was too ridiculous not to mention when my research turned it up.


	4. Presents For All

True to his word, Deke left a few days later, promising to return “after—you know.” Jemma found his hesitance to directly reference the impending happy event endearing, if a bit silly, and ordered a new dog pillow to reside under the guest room bed until such time as it would be needed again. Just nesting, she told Fitz, who merely pointed out the oddity that was creating a nest for her _grandson’s_ arrival before bringing up the topic of hospital bags, just in case Baby followed in their footsteps and did everything early.

“Everything developmentally,” she agreed, “but not always in a timely fashion, you must admit. If Baby’s anything like you, leaving a nice warm dark cozy place for the harsh light of day will be anathema.”

“But I always do if it means being with you,” Fitz argued, and the truth of that statement, combined with the matter-of-factness with which he said it, made her feel so fond of him she agreed to pack their bags even knowing they would be tripping over them for several months. And, as it turned out, they were both right: October had barely gone before they needed them, but the only reason they weren’t still underfoot was because on returning from the hospital Fitz had his hands full with wife and child and vase of flowers and all and had left them in the boot.

“We should bring them in eventually,” Jemma said wearily, several days after their homecoming and several minutes after the baby had dropped off to sleep and been safely stowed in the Moses basket sitting on its stand by the end of the sofa. Fitz handed her a mug of tea and bent over the basket for another quick look.  “I know there’s no reason they can’t stay there, but I’ll feel better knowing everything is back in its proper place.”

Though he looked like he’d much rather fall down on the floor and sleep for a day straight, Fitz put his hands to the small of his back and nodded. “All right. For you, anything, even braving the bitter November wind.”

“Is it windy? I feel like I haven’t seen outside in days.”

“I honestly couldn’t tell you,” he said, “Mops has been outside more than either of us. But it seems likely. I’ll be back with a full report.”

He kissed the top of her head absent-mindedly and trotted out of the lounge. Listening for his footsteps, she smiled to hear them going towards the front door—the long way to the car, rather than through the kitchen; poor thing was as tired as she was, if not more, and was obviously on autopilot. She would have to convince him to take a nap this afternoon, once the midwife had gone. Fortunately, she was due at any minute and with any luck the appointment wouldn’t take very long. In fact—Jemma sat up slightly, hearing the creak of the front door followed by Fitz’s surprised murbling—that was likely her now, since two sets of feet were coming back down the corridor. She adjusted her shirt and leaned over the basket to settle the baby’s blankets, glancing up when the lounge door opened.

Fitz stuck his head in, making significant gestures with his eyebrows. “We’ve got a visitor.”

“Yes, we were expecting…”

“Deke?” He opened the door the rest of the way, revealing, indeed, not the warm and tiny midwife, but the gangly form of their time-travelling progeny with his hands full of tissue-filled gift bags. “We were expecting him, it’s true, but I thought he might call first. Don’t know why, since he never has before.”

“Couldn’t this time anyway,” Deke said cheerfully, “lost my phone somewhere in Laos. Anyway, you said your door was always open, and it was actually true this time. I got here right when Fitz opened it. Which is good, because all this stuff is really heavy. Do you want to just open it now?”

“Oh, well,” she began, but he blasted forward without waiting, dropping the bags and following them to the ground. “Mops isn’t in here, is she? She might get pretty excited about some of this.”

“No, she’s outside. Deke, could you possibly—”

“So, I went on the Bing and typed in “what do babies like” and it came up with all kinds of good stuff, though I don’t know anything about babies so I’m not sure _why_. Let’s see.” He dove into the biggest bag, shovelling an avalanche of white tissue to the floor. “Oh, this is a good one—a mirror! Why do babies like mirrors? Should we be teaching them to be so self-centered? I don’t know! Whatever!” Tossing the box Fitz’s direction, he went after another bag and pulled out a throw rug with a flourish. “Something red! Babies spend a lot of time lying on the ground, don’t they?”

“Eventually. But Deke—”

A third one divulved several sack-like layettes. “These are called Woombies! They’re for snuggling!”

Jemma made an involuntary shhing noise, casting a worried glance baby-way and reaching out one hand towards Deke. “And they’re lovely, but Deke, I’m sorry, the baby’s just got to sleep; could you be a little quieter?”

“I beg you,” Fitz said, desperate around the eyeballs.

Deke paused halfway down the last bag. “Wait, the baby—you had the baby? But you're still—you know.” He made a rounded motion in front of his stomach, which she did her best to ignore.

“That's common at first. Fitz, you didn’t tell him?”

“I thought he got the text.” Fitz spread out his hands helplessly. “Why else would he be here?”

Deke sunk back onto his heels, staring rather blankly into space. “I came early. Everyone said that you wouldn’t want visitors right after the baby was born, so I came early to bring the presents and stay with Mops—didn’t you say November 15th? I thought I wrote it down right.”

She nodded. “We did, but I did say that it could be sooner—and so it was. 5th November, right in the middle of the fireworks.”

“A bit of a shock,” Fitz put in, “but we’re well grateful to have that part over with. It got awfully nerve-wracking towards the end.”

“So she’s here, now? Where?” Deke ran his hands down the legs of his trousers, glancing quickly around the room, only to freeze when his eye caught on the Moses basket. Slowly he stood, taking small soft steps until he could look down on the round cheeks and knit hat of the newest member of the family. “Wow. Oh, my gosh, wow. She’s so tiny. But gorgeous. This is amazing.” One finger reached out, hovering just over the baby’s blankets. “Guys, I know she’s sleeping, but when she wakes up, do you think I could hold her? ”

He looked between Jemma and Fitz with all the eagerness of Mops at dinnertime, nearly squirming but trying so hard to behave nicely. Only Mops always got her dinner, and poor Deke— Fitz grimaced, and Jemma’s fond smile became tight at the corners. No idiot, Deke realized something was wrong and stepped back, his own grin dimming. “Or not, that’s cool. I’ve never held a baby before, so I can understand if you don’t want to let me. She’s probably pretty fragile.”

“No, Deke, it’s not that.” Jemma twisted her hands together in her lap, wanting to reach out to him but not sure if he would welcome it. “Fitz hadn’t held a baby either, and he’s been smashing at it. Of course you can. But, Deke, it isn’t…I mean, the baby—”

She had delivered much worse news in her life—news that was far more personally painful, news that had far wider ramifications—and yet, she couldn’t find the words to say this. She looked at Fitz, floundering, and he sent her all the love and comfort his eyes could hold and put one hand on Deke’s shoulder. “Maybe we should have an introduction first? Deke, meet Archie. Archibald, I’m sorry to say, and James after me, Fitz-Simmons.”

From her place on the sofa, Jemma could see the exact moment Deke understood. For such a demonstrative person, his grief was surprisingly small; she had to know to look for the tension in a jawline, the quick swallow of disappointed hope, the eyes skittering away from comforting glances. His head drooped, just a bit, between his shoulders, and he stared into the basket at Archie. “It’s...a boy.”

“We did tell you it might be,” she said, as gently as she possibly could.

“Yes, but—” He shook his head. “I didn’t really think—I thought it had to be—”

“Time isn’t fixed, apparently,” said Fitz, but without edge. “If you had got the text—”

“Yeah. If I had.”

Scooting to the edge of the sofa, Jemma mimicked Deke’s posture and looked down at her son—their son, with her nose and Fitz’s ears and his fingers splayed over the blanket like they were making the most of their newly-discovered space, and his mouth with its lips pushed forwards petulantly, and his eyelids with their insubstantial lashes covering eyes she confidently expected would stay blue. She wondered, before he was born, if she might be sorry if it was a boy in the end, but from the instant they laid him goopy and squalling on her chest any loss or regret transformed into a sense of certain rightness. _Yes_ , she had thought as a grey-faced but awed Fitz repeated “our _son_ ” over and over, _yes, this is who we’ve been waiting for._ He was himself, and she would never want him to be anyone else. She put her hand on Archie’s foot, telling him silently that he was in no way a disappointment, and looked for the words to find the middle way between their joy and Deke’s grief.   

Before she could, Deke shook his head and ducked out from under Fitz’s hand, turning sharply towards the abandoned gifts. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing none of these are gender specific. Once again, Bing does not let me down.”

Jemma blinked at the rapid change in mood, but Fitz was quicker on his feet, pinching the bridge of his nose in faux-pain. “No, Deke.”

“Everyone uses it on CBS, they can’t all be wrong.”

“They can. They really, really can.”

“So”—Deke whirled again, canting his head in her direction, “Jemma has tea, do you have tea, Fitz? Can I have tea? I brought some really nice stuff from China—at least they told me it was nice—I got a great deal on it, I think. Can I make some?”

“Of course,” Jemma said, slowly sorting that out, “or Fitz can, if you—”

He waved a dismissive hand. “No, no. I’ll do it. Even I can boil water in your fancy kettle, and I know where the sugar is. It’ll take me, like, five minutes.”

“If you spill the sugar be sure to wipe it up,” Fitz said, his eyes very decidedly speaking to her, and as soon as the door banged shut behind Deke he held up both hands to stop her from saying any of the things that she wanted to. “Jemma, please, don’t try to make him talk about it.”

“But we’ll have to, sometime,” she protested, and he nodded.

“Yes, but the midwife will be here any minute. It’s not really the kind of thing we want anybody walking in on.” He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “And anyway, he doesn’t _want_ to talk about it yet, Jemma. You know that as well as I do, or you would if your social senses weren’t dulled by exhaustion. Just, give him a minute to lose his mother all over again.”

When he put it like that, there was nothing else to be done but to smile and accept the new tea when Deke returned from the kitchen with Mops at his heels, slightly red about the eyes but otherwise as exuberant as ever. As they sipped the surprisingly good brew, he told them all about the Moon Festival—the mooncakes, the dragon parades, the piles of fruit, the courtship dances.

“Look, I have no idea how it works,” he said from his place on the floor, leaning back on one hand, “but somehow people find the person they’re supposed to marry by tossing handkerchiefs in the air. Isn’t that cool? China could possibly be the best place I’ve ever been.”

“You did say that about Egypt,” Jemma said.

“And Morocco before that,” Fitz pointed out.

“And Alaska before that, actually.”

Deke flung out his arms, almost dousing Fitz with half the contents of his mug. Mops _ruff_ ed excitedly. “Everywhere I go is the best place I’ve ever been! Anywhere that’s not underground. And actually, not even that, because I went to these caves in Vietnam, oh my gosh, they were _amazing_. I was so glad I bought a good camera to take pictures. And then I had to figure out how to put them online so I’d never lose them.”

“Are they online?” Jemma set her mug down, looking around for her computer. Fitz, bless him, retrieved it from the side table drawer, where they were hiding it from Mops. “Let’s see them!”

With more skill than would be expected from a person whose search engine of choice was Bing, Deke navigated to a blog page called “The World Isn’t Blown Up So I’m Seeing All of It” and started scrolling through his pictures, holding up the laptop so Jemma and Fitz could both see. His captions, long-winded and full of exclamation marks, went perfectly with the images, which more often than not included some portion of Deke’s ecstatic face or a group of strangers making thumbs up. Those that didn’t, though, were as breathtaking as promised, and they went through several weeks of pictures before Jemma noticed the comments below the posts. When asked about them, Deke was modest.

“Yeah, so I got the emails of the people I took pictures with and sent them a link to the posts they were in, and I guess they showed them to other people, because I started getting comments from people I haven’t met. And someone showed me how to link it to Twitter and Instagram and a bunch of other stuff, so then I got more. There’s a lot of people now that I’ve never met who comment on my things! So I’m going to have to do something cool while I’m here because I said I was coming to Scotland next and I don’t think they’d be very interested in a bunch of pictures of Mops.” He looked over the screen to where the dog had her head on his knee. “But they should be! Yes, yes they should be!”

One corner of Fitz’s mouth slanted upwards. “Did you accidentally become a travel blogger?”

Eyebrows drawn together, Deke shrugged. “I mean, not really _accidentally_ —I was thinking about what I could do if I didn’t become the host of _The Amazing Race_ and this was a thing people talked about online. It takes a long time to make money at it, but I don’t need a lot of money and I do have a lot of time, so—” He shrugged again. “I just, I started to make the life I wanted to have, you know?”

Raging hormones made tears spring to Jemma’s eyes, and she had to look quickly away to avoid embarrassing him. At her side, Fitz tried to play it equally cool. “That’s not a bad idea, actually. You’ve certainly got a unique perspective, so it could be something. Who knows.”

“Not me,” Deke said, “but pretty much everything I ever counted on in life didn’t happen the way I thought, so I can roll with the punches.” But his eyes darted to the basket where Archie slept on, and he took a deep breath before turning the computer back around. “So, do you want to see the pictures from the Moon Festival?”

Suddenly looking at the clock, Jemma sat up as sharply as she could. “Oh, Fitz! The midwife was meant to be here. You don’t think she’s been knocking and we haven’t heard her?”

Fitz sat up too, digging in his pocket after his phone. “These doors aren’t thick enough—” Pushing the home button, he stopped mid-sentence and relaxed. “Oh, here’s a text I missed. She said she’s running about forty-five minutes behind; she’s had car trouble. We have not left her on the doorstep to freeze.”

“Oh, good.” Jemma leaned forward to be sure Archie was still breathing and, finding he was, curled back up again. “By all means, then, show us the Moon Festival.”

Deke’s pictures of the festival were even better than his pictures of the caves, stuffed to the brim with light and life and joy; no surprise, she thought, that he responded so strongly to it. Stopping on one image of a street choked with red lanterns, Deke peered thoughtfully at the ceiling. “I got a lantern to bring you—I wonder where it is? Just a little one. They represent good luck and having lots of babies and stuff like that, so I thought it was appropriate.”

“Certainly,” Jemma said kindly, though it would be more appropriate thematically than as a decorative piece. The monkey he brought from Morocco already shrieked loudly from the shelf above the television. “Is it in the other parcel you brought?”

“Oh, that—” Mops’ head fell off his knee as he twitched, shoving the computer off his lap and slamming it shut. “No. That’s another gift for—for the baby. It’s just something stupid.”

Fitz wisely held his tongue. Casting a wary eye at the lighted magnifying mirror Deke had already given them, Jemma tried and failed to imagine what Deke might consider stupid. “Oh, I find that difficult to believe. You’ve already brought such lovely things.”

“Yeah, but this is a thing that doesn’t—never mind.” He shook his head, looking almost disgusted. “It’s dumb. I was dumb. I shouldn’t have thought it was a good idea.”

“If you thought it was once, it’s worth saying,” she said. “That’s a bit of a rule in this house.”

Deke looked skeptically at Fitz, who nodded. “Don’t question how many breakthroughs have begun as dumb ideas. We have that rule for a reason.”

“Fine.” Jerking the bag towards him, he yanked out the tissue paper and turned the bag over, leaving whatever was in it to fall and and roll across the floor until it came to rest between their feet. Fitz bent over to retrieve it, coming up confused. “An orange?”

“An orange!” Deke jumped to his feet and waved both hands in the air. “See, it’s dumb! It’s not even a thing you do. It’s just, my mom gave me an orange on my birthday every year—who knows how she got it—and I thought I would bring her one for her birthday instead, like I always wanted to when I was a kid. But that’s not my mom, so it’s just a random piece of fruit from a random guy, and it’s stupid!”

“Deke—”

“It’s not—”

But as though he had already learnt the Fitz-Simmons habit of speaking over each other, Archie chose that moment to enter the conversation, raising his voice in a thin, creaky wail of protest. On his feet in an instant, Fitz left the orange on the cushion and scooped Archie from the basket, kissing his forehead and murmuring “it’s okay, we’re here” before laying him in Jemma’s waiting arms. Not for the first time in the last two days, she marvelled at how such a little being could evoke so much love.

“There, there, darling,” she crooned. “I know it’s alarming, but Deke is allowed to be upset. So are you, of course. We’ll sort it out together.”

“What’s to sort out?” Deke had to shout to be heard over Archie’s wails. “There’s nothing we can do about it _now_. Nothing we could do about it ever. You have your kid, and it’s not my mom, and that’s just the way it is.”

“You’re right.”

Deke stopped pacing and Archie stopped crying at the same moment, both looking at Fitz with wide eyes and open mouths. Quickly distracted by his tongue, Archie ceased to pay attention, but Deke took a step back and frowned. “I’m right?”

“Well, yeah.” Fitz took a deep breath, glancing at her for confirmation. She raised both eyebrows: _didn’t you say to wait?_ He raised one shoulder and one side of his mouth: _it’s happening anyway?_

“If you’re going to say something just say it,” Deke said fiercely. “I don’t know your eye language but that doesn’t mean I don’t know you’re talking about me.”

 _Go on then_ , she told Fitz, and he nodded sharply. “Okay,” he said, putting his hands on his hips, “the thing is, you’re right—Archie isn’t your mum. And we think, actually, even if we had a girl instead, she wouldn’t have been your mum, either.”

“I know.” Deke kicked at the carpet bitterly. “Two parents, the likelihood of my mom and my dad—”

“Right, right, but also—we aren’t...we’re not the same Jemma and Fitz that had your mum. They were a Jemma and Fitz from a different loop—from two different loops, actually, because of the cryofreezing. And we, we’re both from this loop. And so, genetically, we’re identical to your grandparents, but because _time_ can apparently be rewritten but _matter_ just changes forms, our matter and that matter isn’t the same. That’s even assuming the exact same DNA transfer, which is unlikely. So. Any daughter the two of us have still wouldn’t be your mum.”

As Deke listened, his shoulders drew closer and closer to his ears, until his bright hurt eyes peered over the collar of his coat like a turtle peering out from its shell. “Is any of this supposed to make me feel better?”

“That’s just the first part,” Jemma said, “Fitz, it’s in the drawer in the—”

“Kitchen, right.” Fitz held up his hand as though he was telling Mops to stay. She, well-trained, sat obediently; Deke, miserable, didn’t move, even when Fitz let the door bang shut behind him and Archie started fussing again. Tucking the baby into her chest, Jemma watched Deke, concerned. “He’ll just be a moment.”

“If this little speech included visual aids you probably should have had them ready before you started.”

He was right, of course, and she didn’t deny it. Instead, she held out the hand not currently holding Archie. “Would you help me up, Deke? I’m getting a bit stiff.”

He hauled her to her feet with more care than his grimace indicated, then collapsed in the very exact middle of the sofa. Fishing behind him, he pulled out the orange and made a face at it. “Stupid. I told you.”

“It isn’t stupid,” she said. He snorted.

Fitz returned, phone in one hand and a gift-wrapped box the size of a bar of soap in the other. “Pinna says she’s about ten minutes out, just so you know. Not to hurry this along, but—”

“No, it’s fine, I’ll just sit here until you finish your speech and then get back on the road. No big deal. There’s got to be a nice hostel with room somewhere.”

“Oh, Deke,” she said reproachfully, and Fitz shook his head.

“No, you’re going to stay here. Just listen, okay?”

Deke glowered, crossing his arms over his chest. “Fine.”

Fitz glanced at her and she nodded her agreement. “What would have followed directly after the last bit,” she said, “had we been appropriately prepared, is this: though your mum isn’t our daughter, she still is, in a way, and we love her in abstract because of that. And of course you knew her, so you love and miss her in reality. It’s...very strange, this situation we’re in—but I think that might be another hallmark of our family, loving each other beyond the bounds of common experience.”

“ _Your_ family,” Deke said.

“ _Our_ family.”

At her sign, Fitz passed Deke the gift, scratching at his beard once it left his hands. “We didn’t know what was going to happen, obviously, but we wanted you to have this anyway. It only seemed right.”

“For me?” Deke turned it over, shook it, flicked at the seam with one fingernail.

Jemma bit her lip. “Research suggests that a gift can be a good way to reassure a member of the family who might feel displaced by the arrival of a new baby. I expect the suggestion is really for a sibling or a pet, but—”

One of Fitz’s fingers snuck out to wrap around hers. “Just open it,” he said.

More eager than she expected he wanted to be, Deke obeyed, tossing the paper to the floor with the rest of the wrapping. “A box. There’s something in the box, right? It would be mean just to give me an empty—”

His face went slack, all the practiced indifference and careful hardness gone in an instant, and he stared at the freshly-cut house key with something approaching wonder. “Is this for me? It’s a key to your house, right?”

“We know,” Jemma said, bouncing gently from side-to-side to keep Archie quiet, “that you have a great deal of world left to see and a great many adventures to have. We just wanted you to know that, wherever you go in the world, if you like, you can always consider this your home.”

“And us your family,” Fitz said. “Not just genetically.”

Taking the key from the box with two fingers, Deke held it up to the light for a moment, rubbing at his eyes with the heel of the other hand. Then, all at once, he chucked it to the side with the orange, flew up, and swooped in like a hawk, wrapping one arm around each of their shoulders to pull them in for a giant hug. Fitz made an _oof_ noise. “Careful of the baby,” he said.

“Oh, sorry.” Deke started to pull away, but Jemma notched her chin over his arm.

“It’s all right. He’s all right.”

They embraced there in their lounge—a man, his infant uncle, and his thirty-year-old grandparents—and if Jemma felt more than one tear splash onto her shoulder, she would never tell. Fitz made a _lord help us_ face over Deke’s head, but she only grinned in response; she knew from the grip he had on Deke’s shoulder blade that he wouldn’t be letting go any time soon. And in fact they wouldn’t have moved if Archie hadn’t started squirming rather intentionally, demanding his fair share of the affection going around. After ensuring he didn’t have any physical needs to be met, Jemma wrapped him back up in the blanket and handed him to a slightly anxious Deke. “You won’t hurt him,” she promised. “Babies are very resilient.”

“Okay,” he said, adjusting his hands one finger at a time, “but you have to know, I don’t think they made babies this small at the Lighthouse.”

“Here. I’ll sit right next to you, just in case.” And also because she couldn’t quite bear to be more than two feet away from Archie just yet. Fitz settled into the chair across the room, leaning his head against the back of the seat and watching them with fond, exhausted eyes.

“You can take the night shift, if you want,” he said.

“Thanks but no thanks, unless it’s a shift with Mops. Someone’s got to pay attention to her.”

“If we can’t pay attention to our dog and our child at the same time, we’re going to be rubbish at parenting.”

“Especially since there’s two of you.”

The midwife would be there any moment, and they didn’t have much time for further conversation. But before she came, Jemma had one more question. “Deke? If you don’t mind. We’ve been wondering—what was your mother called?”

He swallowed, looking up from under damp eyelashes. “Lucy.”

“Lucy.” The name of her grandmother, who had been a Wren during the war; she and Fitz had discussed it, if they had a daughter. Fitz’s chair creaked.

“She said it meant light.” Deke cautiously stretched his little finger to rub against the back of Archie’s tiny hand. “She said her dad always told her, even though we lived in the dark, we were each other’s light to hold onto.”

Jemma had to blink back her own tears, reaching out to take Archie’s foot in one hand. She would always be sorry, perhaps, that she wouldn’t know Deke’s mother, but she couldn’t be sorry that she didn’t have to watch her daughter grow up in a sunless, hopeless future or have her grandson lose his mother before his tenth birthday. And she was glad, immeasurably so, to know that even in the bleakest possible timeline, the family she and Fitz made was not overcome by the darkness.

Ignorant of his mother’s deep emotions, Archie kicked out, frog-like, in protest. “Oh, let me be,” she told him firmly, “I just want to hold onto you a moment.”

Deke smiled at her, his shoulders curling in more protectively, and she put her other hand against his arm. “You’re doing tremendously. Almost as well as Fitz.”

“High praise, but don’t exaggerate. I know I can never measure up to Gramps.”

“True, it is always better to face facts.” She cast a glance over her shoulder, drawing Fitz in with the warmth of her gaze. He met her eyes and smiled, breathing slow and even, for all the world the image of a man utterly content.

When the midwife came in, she took Archie from Deke and clucked at him kindly. “And you’re an uncle? Mr. Fitz-Simmons’ brother, perhaps?”

“Oh, no,” Deke said, slumping back against the cushions relieved of responsibility. “I’m—well, I’m—”

“It’s kind of a complicated relationship to explain,” Fitz said, “but family. Definitely family.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why yes, I did make Archie's birthday be the airing date of FZZT. I have no shame.


	5. Four Years Later

Deke tumbled into the corridor, almost tripping over his duffel when it dropped from his sloped shoulder. One of these days, he was going to get Fitz to fix that lock so he didn’t have to run into the door like a battering ram every time he came in. “Hello!” he shouted, in case his entrance hadn’t made enough noise, “anyone here?”

A roar from the general area of the lounge indicated the answer to his question. In another two seconds, the door flew open and Archie flew out, launching himself into the air as soon as he could reasonably expect Deke to catch him. It was a pretty tricky catch this time, not that Deke would ever say so—he hadn’t dropped Archie once in the last four years and he had no intention of starting now. Winding his legs around Deke’s waist and his arms around Deke’s neck, Archie squeezed him as tight as a cobra. “Hi! I didn’t know you were coming today!”

“Got an earlier flight from Reykjavík,” he said, squeezing back, “and when I can spend more time with my favourite kiddos, I do. Plus, it’s a big day tomorrow! Georgie will only turn one year old one time. Is anyone else here?”

“Course,” Archie said, giving him the _are-you-serious_ look Deke had come to expect from his family, “Mama and Da wouldn’t leave me here _alone_. Mama is in the lab and Da is giving Georgie a bath. I am watching _Octonauts_.”

“Great choice.”

“I saw this one already. It’s much better you’re here. Where is—” His forehead wrinkled.

“Reykjavik?” Archie nodded. Deke detached one arm and pointed vaguely northwest, he thought. “It’s in Iceland. Which is, remember—”

“Green! What did you see there?”

“I rode horses on a beach with black sand to see reindeer, seals, and birds—there were so many birds, Bobo, your mom would have loved them. And the stars were amazing there. I took about a million pictures for you.”

“Did you tell your internet friends they were for me?”

“I don’t know, what do you think?”

“I think yes!”

“Oh, you do?” He wiggled his fingers against Archie’s sides, leaning back to balance the weight of the little boy squirming to get away from the tickling. “Why would you think that?”

Archie could hardly get the words out between giggling, but managed, “Your internet friends love me and Georgie and Mops! And Mama and Da, but not as much.”

“My internet friends just think it’s funny I call them Gran and Gramps.”

“It is funny,” Archie insisted, loosening his legs to slide down Deke’s body. “Because grandmas and grandpas are _really_ old and you and Mama and Da are just a little bit old.”

“That is,” Deke said as seriously as he could manage, “exactly why it’s funny. But don’t you think your dad acts like a grumpy old man sometimes?”

“Yes.” Archie nodded, sitting on the floor with his legs out to begin an investigation of Deke’s backpack. “He was very cross about Georgie getting into the flour just now. He was trying to bake her cake. Mama is doing something very important for Mack.”

Deke closed his eyes, already envisioning the crowning glory of tomorrow’s tea. “What’s she doing?”

Archie shrugged. “I’m not allowed. She said it’s...vol-tile.”

“What?”

“It means ‘not safe’.”

“Close.” The voice at the top of the stairs made them both look up to where Fitz held a damp and waving Georgie on his hip. “It means that it would be very easy for it to suddenly change and _that_ might be not safe. Hi, Deke.”

“Hey Fitz.”

They met at the bottom of the staircase so Georgie could lunge from Fitz’s arms to Deke’s. Very seriously, she put a hand on each of his cheeks. “Deee,” she said.

Her round cheeks were irresistible. Deke didn’t even try to not eat them. “Hey, Nan. Looking forward to your birthday?”

“Neffie, she can’t talk like that yet.” Archie said from the floor.

“Eees,” Georgie said, patting Deke’s cheek again.

“Sounds like yes to me,” he said, kissing her another time for good measure, “and she has an amazing cake to look forward to, so who can blame her.”

Fitz groaned. “Assuming it comes out. Assuming Mops hasn’t eaten it off the counter. Jemma’s really the baker—her knack for chemistry. Archie, you didn’t hear a beep while I was upstairs, did you?”

“No, Da.”

“I’ll go check it and get tea on, then. And you, miss”—Fitz pressed the tip of his finger to Georgie’s nose—“stay here with Deke and Archie and try to keep out of trouble for two minutes. I realize I’m asking a lot, but I have confidence in Archie’s ability to behave.”

“Hey,” Deke said, pretending more offence than he felt. Fitz smirked before he disappeared into the kitchen and left Deke to the joys of watching _Octonauts_ with his enthusiastic uncle and wiggle-worm aunt until dinner—and learning, he had to admit, a lot about sea creatures he had never heard before. “Would you ever go under the sea, Neffie?” Archie asked over their beans-on-toast. “Your internet friends might really like it.”

“I think there’s enough to see on land,” he said as he picked Georgie’s cup off the floor and handed it back to her, “but maybe if I run out of places to go. Would you?”

Archie shook his head. “I would like to go to space. I like stars most of all science. Da and Mama went to space, but I wasn’t born yet. I wish I was. Have you been to space?”

Deke looked at Fitz before answering. He always had to check what Archie knew and didn’t know before answering these kinds of questions. Their family history was kind of a field of land mines. Focused on wiping Georgie’s face of the sandwich she had mashed between her front teeth, Fitz just shrugged as if to say _up to you,_ so Deke nodded the affirmative. “Yeah. That’s where I met Gran and Gramps, is in space.”

He expected a lot more questions, but Archie apparently didn’t see anything out of the ordinary in his answer and moved on. “Da built a plane that went into space.”

“I know. I’ve been in that plane.”

Archie sighed heavily. “So have Mack and Yo-yo and Daisy and everybody. I only went to see Grandma and Grandpa and my Nan and the sea. I want to see exciting places too.”

“You’ve got time, old man,” Fitz said. “Mama and I didn’t start to see the world until we were basically grown-ups.”

Archie shoved a spoonful of beans into his mouth, clearly unimpressed. Deke leaned forward and lowered his voice. “He’s right, Bobo. When I was your age, I hadn’t even seen the _sea_.”

“Because you’re not from an island,” Archie said, matter-of-fact.

True, a bit of rock surrounded by space was not the same as a bit of rock surrounded by water. Fitz grinned at him, no doubt thinking the same thing. Just then, the outside door opened, letting in Mops—as excited to see Deke as if he was one giant bacon-flavored treat—and Jemma, who had dark circles under her eyes but a relieved smile on her face. A question and answer flew between his grandparents. Deke still didn’t understand how they had whole conversations in two blinks, but since Fitz’s shoulders relaxed and Jemma’s mouth looked calm when she sat down, he guessed she had figured out whatever was keeping her in the lab. She turned to him with her regular welcoming smile. “Hullo, Deke, it’s good to see you early. Have you had a nice trip? Your pictures were lovely.”

She said the same thing every time he appeared, and he said the same thing every time in response, petting Mops enthusiastically. “Great, thanks. Everything good here?”

“It is now,” she said, emphasizing the _now_. “Mack says hello, by the way. And to you, Fitz. I told him you said hello as well.”

“And me?” Archie piped up.

“Of course and you.” Jemma ran an affectionate hand over Archie’s hair. “Nearly done with tea, darling? It’s nearly bedtime.”

Archie’s lower lip pushed out in a pout. “But Deke just got here!”

“And he’ll be here tomorrow,” she said firmly, “and a few days after that, I hope.”

“Definitely,” Deke promised. “A couple weeks. My internet friends know to expect pictures of Scotland and that’s all. This is my vacation.”

Archie moped all the way to bed, only slightly pacified by Deke volunteering to read his bedtime story while Jemma and Fitz put Georgie down and made their dinner. They actually read two bedtime stories, followed by Deke’s dramatic account of the time he got chased by an ostrich in Australia, before Archie’s eyes started to drift close and Deke could make a run for the kitchen where Fitz had a mug of cocoa already waiting for him.

“I still haven’t had better cocoa than yours anywhere in the world,” Deke said, closing his eyes to better appreciate the miracle that was Fitz's cocoa. “Or out of the world, of course. It’s kinda funny how much Archie loves space, isn’t it?”

“Believe me,” Jemma said, twirling her fork in her pasta, “the irony is not lost on us. But I’ve always loved the stars, too, and my father taught them to me. It would be a pity to lose it just because of a few off-planet sojourns.”

“Speaking of Andrew,” Deke said, “listen to what Archie told me about grandparents.”

They laughed together, Fitz quietly and Jemma with enthusiasm, and Deke relaxed into his seat and pet Mops with his foot. “But since half a million internet people know you as Gran and Gramps now, we’re kind of stuck. I didn’t think it through.”

“A hallmark of yours,” Fitz said, mopping the sauce from his bowl with a crust of bread.

“ _Fitz_ ,” Jemma said like a nanny on television, but Deke wasn’t offended and knew Fitz didn’t mean him to be.

“I like being called ‘Neffie’ anyway.”

“We were never ones for nicknames,” Jemma said thoughtfully. “It’s odd that our family seems to be collecting them. Neffie, Bobo, Nan...and of course Archie and Georgie are nicknames already.”

Fitz took her empty bowl and his to the sink, leaving them to soak in the basin of soapy water before flicking on the electric kettle and coming right back to the table. “Personally, I’m happy for Archie to be Bobo as long as I don’t have to be. It has to be the worst grandfather name in any reality.”

“Yeah, can’t say who came up with that. Mom never told me that story.”

Fitz looked down at the table, quiet, and Jemma gave Deke the soft smile she wore whenever he mentioned his mom. It had taken awhile, but over the last few years they had become able to talk about her without it being too weird. It was actually, if he let himself admit it, really good. After her death, he and his dad had been too traumatised to discuss her even casually, and no one else felt comfortable talking about someone so obviously dangerous—Deke got used to keeping his memories like treasures. But his grandparents knew a thing or two about loving someone who no one else would recognize as gone. They had all kinds of fancy theories about time and the brain and energy to explain it, but at the end of their lecture Deke just figured that his mom existed as long as he remembered she did and her life mattered as much as he said. And Jemma and Fitz, who he had learned loved even more and better than they thought, said she mattered too. His mom _had_ existed—been raised by Fitz and Jemma, raised Deke, loved them all and lived a life worth remembering. He would always miss her, but this was the next best thing.

“It was probably your dad,” Fitz said, totally breaking the mood. “We already know he didn’t have the best taste in names.”

“ _Fitz_.”

Ignoring him, Deke snapped his fingers, making Mops’ ears perk up. “Oh, that reminds me, I brought the orange for Georgie like you asked. I thought about bringing one from me too, but then she would have two and I thought Archie might have hurt feelings because he only got one on his birthday, so—”

Jemma cut him off. “That was very thoughtful, Deke.”

“And!” He dug in the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of the chair. “I found this thing, _totally_ by accident, and brought it for us to try.” His hand found the slightly squashed box and put it in the middle of the table. “A chocolate orange! Only two of the best things in the whole world!”

Fitz and Jemma shared the only one of their looks he could translate­— _oh Deke—_ but showed him how to properly break open the chocolate orange and pull it into segments, and Jemma brought out cheese and crackers and they ate those with tea and hot cocoa until three in the morning, talking and bickering and brainstorming and laughing over each other about everything and nothing. It had become their habit on his first night home and was maybe his favourite thing he did in his whole life. He would never say so, though—he would probably just get confused looks if he tried. They didn’t see it as anything strange. That kind of conversation was just the Fitz-Simmons way.

“The sheets are clean,” Jemma whispered as they stood in the corridor at 3:17, “and Mops’ pillow is still in there. We’ll try to keep Archie out until a decent hour, but I can’t make any promises.”

“It’s okay,” he said, “I don’t mind losing a little sleep.”

Kissing his cheek, she disappeared up the stairs. “She gets affectionate late at night,” Fitz told him, as though Deke hadn’t figured that out. “Thanks for the orange. Glad you’re here.”

“Me too.”

Fitz clapped Deke on the shoulder and they made their way up in silence, Fitz turning into his bedroom and Deke continuing to the bathroom. He had left his duffel in the hall, but a clean toothbrush sat in a cup on the sink next to a new tube of bubblegum toothpaste—Jemma’s doing, no doubt. She knew he didn’t like the mint kind. The light stayed on when he left in case Archie needed to find his parents in the night, and he moved quietly past Jemma and Fitz’s barely-open door. Their murmurs followed him down the stairs.

He came into his room, yawning. The guest room, officially, but since it was filled to the brim with stuff he had bought on his trips and he kept all his seasonal clothes here, he had a hard time thinking of it as anything else. It even had his bed, moved down from the first floor when Jemma and Fitz built the room off the lounge before Georgie’s birth, and a picture of the five of them sat on the bedside table next to the charging station. A quiet snore already rose from the pillow in the corner where Mops was collapsed. Deke copied her quickly, pulling the thick covers up to his chin. A great bed, this. It was a shame he wouldn’t get to enjoy it for long tonight. But, thinking about the breakfast he would have in the morning—stacks of bacon and a perfect cup of tea and Georgie in his lap feeding him grapes one by one and Archie’s chatter and Jemma and Fitz taking turns to baby him and tease him—he couldn’t regret it too much. Lose a couple hours of sleep? Look at what he would gain.


End file.
